The only people who had those pagers were Hezbollah members. Hezbollah has been lobbing missiles into Israel, killing civilians including children and forcing an evacuation. They picked a fight, why should there be an expectation that Israel just sits back and takes it? Don’t get me wrong about Gaza, they have gone way too far there. But Hezbollah seems at least somewhat justified.
All politicians meet with lobbyists. It’s hard to get a handle on the needs of the nation (or state, or so on), and lobbying is how people inform their representatives of that need. Now whether those lobbyists are scumbags or saints, that’s a different question.
Politician, perhaps. But I’m going to have to put a spotlight on Jonathan Mitchell, who came up with the structure behind the Texas Heartbeat Bill, which did an end run around judicial review by allowing enforcement via civil action by damn near anyone. The usual way to legally dispute a potentially unconstitutional law is to sue the government officials that enforce it, but because there wasn’t a specific person there was no real way to bring it to the judicial branch.
I wouldn’t exactly call that assassination unprovoked. That specific general had led the Quds Force in operations that caused the deaths of hundreds of US soldiers and the injuries of tens of thousands of other soldiers. Then there’s the many, many other operations that the Quds Force have engaged in as part of Iran’s proxy wars in the region. He definitely earned a spot on the shit list.
Was it a wise decision to target him? I don’t know. But he had done plenty to deserve his fate.
I was ready to hear something like a story from someone who had signed onto a medical trial and was upset the trial was ending. Nope, instead an absurdly short support period that seemingly is fed by the same culture of replacement over repair that has infected our economy.
The latter. The US only has a veto in the Security Council. Though even that isn’t entirely unconditional. Recently it abstained on a vote about a cease fire resolution, leading to much entitled complaining from Israel.
And not just the poor and minorities. Trump apparently had the DOJ go after people he perceived as disloyal or political enemies, costing them millions of dollars in legal fees. Imagine if the government then just got a redo whenever it wanted. Even for a fairly wealthy person, that’s going to be a potent tool to silence them.
Sure, to a point. But not about murdering people. And we didn’t then go and do just that. It shows some forethought. There have been other shooters who made posts before hand more or less admitting to wanting to provoke people, then claim self defense. They did not get to claim self defense.
We’ve also managed to wedge ourselves into a situation where Congress can’t handle anything controversial. The closest we came in recent years was the (relatively timid) ACA, and that barely passed after an unpopular war and the 2008 economic crash.
Don’t worry, they’ll pass another strongly worded resolution.
The Indian family down the street is great, but when I can’t cook a nice daal in my Instant Pot because the power’s out then my racist jimmies are rustled.
YOU CAN HAVE MY COBOL ON COGS WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS.
Sure we can. Given the choice, a small percentage of people in a poll will always pick the worst answer. Is Hitler still alive, living in Argentina, and I want to give him a real nice blow job? 5% say yes, yes, and yes.
I’m not too surprised. It must be quite unpleasant working around a noisy piece of machinery like that.
During the US occupation, the Taliban absolutely did attack civilian targets to further political goals. They attacked everything from restaurants to embassies to a university.
I’m doing a series of conversations/interviews with my parents’ generation to keep a voice record of their stories. As part of that, I’m doing transcripts that start with the transcript feature of Google’s Recorder. It can do some nifty things like assign speakers to individual voices. I have to clean up the transcripts some, but it’s far less laborious than dealing with a 15-20 minute conversation. I can fix up a transcript in maybe 5 minutes.
You don’t need to look hard and long enough. You just need to insinuate hard and long enough, then people will believe it eventually.
Well Mr. Trump, if you hadn’t dragged your heels for years, this wouldn’t still be going during the election.
So I started actually looking up numbers and they indeed look good from certain sources, but I’m still giving them the side eye. For instance, the CDC shows Mississippi as having the #1 murder rate among the states in 2022.
44% children, 26% women, 30% men. Gaza is about half under 18, so that’s nearly randomly killing people. That said, these are only confirmed fatalities, so presumably susceptible to bias.
The report is here